4 Exercises to Improve Blood Flow & Circulation in the Legs (for Seniors)

there are some simple ways for seniors to improve blood flow and circulation in their legs without needing to do tons of walking and in today's video I'm going to show you what those ways are if you don't know who I am my name is Will Harlow and I'm the over 50s specialist physio here at HT physio in Farnham and I'm going to be showing you today four brilliant exercises that seniors can use to improve the blood flow in their legs now limited blood flow is a problem for many people who are over the age of 60. and the reason it's a problem is because limited blood flow causes issues like swelling in the lower legs and the swelling can decrease people's mobility and increase the chances of horrible things like dvts which is a deep vein thrombosis now deep vein thrombosis is basically a blood clot that occurs in the lower leg and if it's dislodged it can cause major issues like pulmonary embolism stroke and heart attacks so improving blood flow to the legs is vital for basically maintaining life but it's also vital for improving Mobility if you don't have good blood flow to your legs then you're not going to be able to use your muscles very well your legs are going to feel tired when you walk and you're basically just not going to be able to do as much exercise as you might like so in today's video I'm going to give you some easy ways to improve your blood flow one of the best ways to improve blood flow of course is walking but many of the people in my audience can't walk as far as they would like for whatever reason sometimes that's because they have an injury sometimes it's arthritis sometimes it's because they have poor circulation anyway so that walking more just simply hurts so this video is going to be perfect for anyone who can't walk as much as they want but they still want to improve their blood flow so let's have a look at these four exercises many of them can be done from a chair I'm going to walk you through each one and explain how they work now the key to improving blood flow in the legs is to use something called the muscle pump and the muscle pump is basically a mechanism that exists within our legs which means that as blood flows down towards the toes because it's moving Against Gravity it needs something else to push it back up again and we don't have anything inside the veins to do that now luckily we do have our muscles and as our muscles contract they effectively pump the blood back up the legs towards the heart again and that is how circulation works so we need to get our muscles in our legs working and I'm going to give you four great exercises that do just that so the first couple of exercises are going to be done from a chair the reason we're doing them from a chair is because a lot my audience they can't walk and they can't stand for long but you can still improve your circulation from a chat so I'm going to show you how I would do the first one and I call this exercise ankle pumps basically what you need is a nice sturdy chair or somewhere comfortable like a sofa and you need something in front of you like another chair or a footstool and probably a couple of pillows on top of it and the reason we've got the pillows on top is because we want to put our leg on top of this and we want our leg or our foot to be higher than our hip so I'm going to set myself up like this so you can see I have one leg up on top of the chair and the pillow like so so if I just turn the chair slightly you'll be able to better see it here I'm relaxed into the chair at the back here and my foot is a little bit higher than my hip so this is how we set up if you're comfortable doing it you can have the other one up as well but I'm just going to show you one leg at a time the exercise is really really simple we're going to be using our calf muscle basically to pump the blood away from the feet and the legs back up the leg towards the heart and we do that just by pointing the toes down and then bringing them back up towards you it's as simple as that so we're basically trying to activate this muscle pump by pointing the toes and lifting them back up and as you do this you're going to try and do it nice and swiftly don't worry about doing it really slowly it should be a nice brisk Movement we are literally trying to pump the blood back away and you're going to try and repeat this for a couple of minutes and you'd be surprised after a few minutes how sort of tired the leg feels in a good way that's because the muscles are working quite hard and this is a really good mechanism to get that blood flowing so I recommend that everyone whenever they're sat down if they're worried about the circulation in their legs they have their leg up like this as long as it's comfortable to do so and that should pump the blood back up I'm going to give you a quick caveat someone who I would not recommend this for is anyone who suffers with sciatica because this position is not great if you've got sciatica in this leg so don't do it if you have sciatica and obviously as with all of the exercises on this video if you're not sure make sure you get checked out by a doctor before you try them now a second great exercise that you can use to improve the blood flow in your legs is something I call the seated car phrase and this is a great exercise for seniors who can't walk as much as they would like and they want another exercise that they can safely do from a chair so the exercise is super simple all you need to do is find a nice sturdy chair and you're going to shuffle towards the edge of it so that your feet are flat on the floor and your knees and hips are about 90 degrees and the simple version of the exercise looks just like this so with your feet flat on the floor you're just going to use your toes to lift your heels up in the air and then slowly come back down so it's a real simple movement and you're Contracting the calf muscle near the bottom of the lower leg so the muscles we're working here called the Soleus muscles and these are very important for walking they live in the lower half of the calf and basically they're also responsible for pumping some of the blood back up towards the heart now for many people this is going to be really really simple so there is a way to make this more advanced and this is the way I recommend most people do it and the way you make it more advanced is basically you just bring your forearms forward and rest your forearms on your thighs and you want to be pressing your body weight down a little bit into your thighs and once you're in this position you just repeat so now I'm pushing not just the weight of my legs but also some of my upper body weight as well so I'm pushing it a little bit harder there I can feel the Soleus muscles working a bit harder As I push up and we're just going to try and do up with two down with two up with two down with two like that so that the movement is steady and you're probably going to feel that after 15 or 20 repetitions you get a bit of tiredness at the bottom of the calf that's a really good thing that means that the muscles are working well and this is another great exercise for improving blood flow and circulation all of these exercises should be done a few times a day if you're not walking around very much if you are walking a lot then you can afford to reduce the frequency of the exercise so the next great exercise we've got for improving blood flow and circulation in the legs is the standing calf raise and and this is a brilliant exercise for activating the upper part of the calf it's really important for walking but the calf is such an important muscle for blood flow in the lower legs and doing it in a standing position is a much better way really of activating it if you can so I'll show you this exercise basically you just need something to hold on to so I'm going to use the back of the chair and you just want a couple of fingers on there for balance and the calf raise is really simple you're going to have your feet about hip width apart your hands on something to balance and you're just going to raise up onto your tiptoes and then slowly come back down so unlike some of the other exercises whether we do this really slowly we're going to try and do this nice and briskly so you're sort of coming up with two down with two up with two down with two getting those calf muscles working and you can probably feel after you do 10 or 15 of these that the calf muscle is having to contract to push your body weight up and that will help with circulation now if you can do 20 of these with no problems and you don't feel any kind of tiredness in your calf whatsoever you can do this on one leg and that would be a little bit more effective at improving the circulation on that leg so feel free to try it like that if it's safe for you to do so I'll show you on the other side how that looks that looks like this and again this is a great exercise to do if you're housebound but you're still walking around and every time you go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea or coffee you can do a set of 10 or 20 of these and you will notice that the swelling in your legs over time starts to reduce for most people and then the fourth exercise I've got for you today that improves blood flow and circulation is the squat and the squat is the mother of all lower limb exercises it works almost all of the muscles throughout the lower limb and it's a great exercise for strength but not just strength because it also improves blood flow it's gonna make sure that these muscles up here are Contracting which means that once the blood is coming past the knee we've got the last bit of the journey before it gets into the abdomen and that is using the quads to push it back up so the squat is a a nice exercise people fear it because they think they have to go right down to the floor but you don't you only need to go six inches down to make this effective you can go deep if you want to but don't worry if you can't so what I recommend people do is they have their feet about shoulder width apart so a little bit wider have something in front of you to hold on to and the movement is like this you're going to sit back and then come up again so the first thing that happens is your bottom goes behind you then you bend your knees and you want your your knees to be moving over your toes okay so a couple of common mistakes I see people make some people do it like this where they don't get the hips involved and as soon as you hit some ankle stiffness you can't go any lower so that's no good the other thing I see people do is they do all hips they don't bend their knee at all and that also is no good because then you're not using your thighs so we want a combination of hip and thigh movement as well so you've got your hands on something you're sitting back imagine you've got a chair behind you you're not quite touching it and then you're coming back up so hips and knees now if this is uncomfortable for you but it's still safe for you to do it then just do small squats so you still get benefit from going down a couple of inches that's still beneficial I can still feel these muscles pumping which is what we want but if you can go deeper and it doesn't hurt feel free to go down to 90 degrees and back up again you don't need to go much further than 90 degrees if we're just doing it for blood flow purposes but obviously if you can go down further you'll get a better workout for your muscles so I recommend most people do this exercise somewhere between 10 or 15 in a row and again do this a few times a day especially if you're housebound for better blood flow and circulation in your legs so those are my four best exercises for seniors to improve blood flow and circulation in their legs I hope you'll see that these are nice and easy things that you can do at home without needing to walk miles and miles and they should decrease the swelling in your legs and improve the circulation as a result anyway I hope you've enjoyed this video if you have please subscribe to the channel and like the video and if you want more from me please feel free to pick up a copy of my book it's called thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon using the link below anyway that's all from me thank you for watching and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: HT Physio – Over-Fifties Specialist Physio

Views: 1,870,310

Keywords: Physiotherapy, Knee Pain, Health, Exercise, Wellness, senior health, Over fifty, total knee replacement, knee arthritis, physical therapy, knee pain, knee replacement, knee pain relief, knee surgery, physical therapy (medical specialty), knee ache, arthritic knee, bob and brad, athlean X, OA knee, knee flexion, knee habits, walking, knee pain when walking, strong legs, improve mobility, better walking, blood flow, circulation, DVT, blood clot, prevent DVT

Id: jfqohbop3Xk

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023